In the Name of All Things Good

Why We Hurt the People We Love

There is this wonder about relationships, be they platonic or romantic, how they bring out the demons inside us, and how they self-destruct from self-inflicted disaster.

I’m not discussing any particular case: abuse, trauma, or just your average brother and sister, or husband and wife, just how normal people hurt each other most when they love each other most.

And I’ve come to realize that inside us is something so dark, so ugly, that we always seem to reject, to hide. I don’t know where it comes from, whether we’re all cursed with a bad side or just cursed with bad lives that bring them out. Still though, I know that the more you know someone, the more comfortable you are with them, the more naked you can be around them.

There’s a thing about being spiritually and emotionally naked around someone, something that both comforts and threatens us, it is that with being so raw, comes being so vulnerable, with all our scars exposed, and all our blemishes there in plain sight. Such nakedness is an acquired mode of being, and it demands above all, trust. And with trust comes secrets, and stories, and laughter, and pain, but also more than anything, the pain of self-discovery.

And so it is, that we hurt the people we love, not because we want to, but because we trust them with a deep, dark part of ourselves, that we deem only right to show them, however we’ve tried to repress.

And in trying to save them, we kill part of ourselves, or try to at least, for it is never easy to break our loyalty to what above all defines us, hamartia.

And it is never fully honest, to conceal or hide away, that part of ourselves which we find most unpleasant, to the people which we trust most with ourselves.

Still, in the back of our minds remains this inner guilt, this disgust towards the reality of our bitter ugliness, and we must live, half-forgiving our mistakes, half-accepting our most tragic flaws, all-regretful of the souls we broke, while failing to fix our own.